Unfamiliar with the subway system -- no doubt because it was designed by Hell's own puzzlemaster -- he found himself deposited three miles away from his destination. He decided to walk the rest of the way. At 11:40 p.m., local residents heard arguing, followed by gunshots. Henryk suffered a bullet to his lung, then staggered to a nearby house and rang the doorbell ... that the occupants didn't answer because of the gunshots they just heard. He collapsed in the street and died before help could reach him.

Police arrived on the scene, but there was such a severe lack of manpower and equipment that they could only spare a single detective with a Polaroid camera -- which is a perfectly fine setup for, say, attending a wedding, but not ideal for, say, solving murders. The detective was accompanied by a forensic team that specialized in burglaries and other non-fatal crimes, so they were woefully out of their depth from the start.

Todd Heisler/The New York TimesNever forget solved.

Oh, and they had no lights to work under, and therefore had to rely on flashlights. Honestly, it's amazing the police made it out of there alive.

In the end, they were unable to turn up a single lead in the case -- no witnesses, no evidence, and no obvious perpetrators. They're still trying, with a $12,000 reward for any information about the murder. But while time may heal all wounds, it does approximately dick for criminal apprehension.

Only hours after the Brothers Kouachi stormed the printworks, co-terrorist Amedy Coulibaly launched an attack on a kosher supermarket, killed four people, took the rest as hostages, and demanded the safe release of the brothers. Amidst the carnage, some citizens were able to escape to an underground storage room. Reasonably sure that this whole terrorist siege thing wasn't going to end well, they texted their friends and loved ones to say goodbye ... which one station, BFMTV, learned of and promptly broadcast without a care in the world: "There's a person, a woman, who might have been hiding from the start in the fridge. And who is probably still there."

Luckily, Coulibaly didn't have access to a television at the time, and those folks remained undetected until commandos breached the supermarket and bought him an economy ticket right behind the Kouachis.

So you can see why, after being rescued by police, Lilian got up and went right after the media for voluntarily cosplaying as s**thead reporter Richard Thornburg in this whole terrible Die Hard LARP.

With his stockpile of tinned meat and chocolate, Speck set off on his voyage in May of 1932. He paddled through Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, and eventually reached Cyprus several months later ... where he realized that copper mining sucked, and aimlessly buttin' around on a canoe was way better.

Australian Maritime Museum"Also, I'm stuck in this thing."

By 1936, he'd crossed Asia, from India to Burma and beyond. In 1939, when Speck landed on Thursday Island, an island (duh) on the tip of Australia's Northern Territory, he was met by two constables who presented him with a congratulatory pair of handcuffs. They charged him as an enemy combatant sent to disrupt the war effort. Now, Speck had clearly departed Germany before the war had begun, but those savvy cops knew wily ol' Hitler loved to play the long game, and this one confused guy in a canoe was certainly the linchpin for the greatest war the world had ever seen.

Speck spent the next several years rotating through the country's various internment camps. Only after the war was he finally released and told to go home. As that had since been bombed to hell, however, he cut his losses and stayed in Australia. He set up an opal-dealing business and lived a decent life, but you can still use him as a cautionary example to get out of the family canoe trip. We won't tell anybody.

So yes, the fact that you've never heard of him before now is indeed an ominous portent ...

After JFK took his ill-fated ride through Dealey Plaza, Vaughn dropped his impersonations out of respect and tried to move back into mainstream comedy. America wouldn't have any of it, however. He was "funny JFK guy" and only "funny JFK guy," and no, he couldn't be "funny JFK guy" anymore.

Vaughn never recovered his following. Before he died in 2004, he sold his life rights in the hope that someone would one day turn his tale into a movie, but nothing ever came of it. Actually, maybe Nothing Ever Came Of It is a good title for that movie. Or at least an exceedingly grim epitaph.

Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook, and has a newsletter about depressing history that you can subscribe to. It's really good, honest.

Vaughn probably could've gone back to JFK impersonations later in life -- after all, people make flippin' JFK bobbleheads now.

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